


a crack in the heart through which the world pours out

by anonymousAlchemist



Series: Lucretia Cycle [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, its a long year for my girl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 11:53:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11230401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousAlchemist/pseuds/anonymousAlchemist
Summary: The nights are long, the days are short, and Lucretia is mending a spaceship.In the days to come, she will wish she had died.Instead of one of the others, that is. Lucretia does not know how to repair machinery. She doesn't know how to hide from the local populace. She does not know how to fly spaceships. Lucretia is a biographer and a records-keeper. She watches, she writes, she paints. She's the last person on board who should have lived.





	a crack in the heart through which the world pours out

**Author's Note:**

> here have some lucretia fic. will be followed up with a post-year fic where luc gets a fucking hug. unbeta'd and HOT off the presses. 
> 
> hope you enjoy!
> 
> The accompanying soundtrack for this fic is [Warrior](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CmcnWQ-754), by Aurora.

In the days to come, she will wish she had died.

Instead of one of the others, that is. Lucretia does not know how to repair machinery. She doesn't know how to hide from the local populace. She does not know how to fly spaceships. Lucretia is a biographer and a records-keeper. She watches, she writes, she paints. She's the last person on board who should have lived.

Right now, though, Lucretia huddles in the corner of her room behind Fischer, praying that the strangers who have crashed their ship do not find her.

Fischer pulses reassuringly. Water is leaking out of his tank and puddling on the floor. Lucretia's shoes are getting soaked. She breathes shallowly, as if the strangers will find her if she makes too much noise. The lights flicker. The crash must have knocked out the power. Lucretia closes her eyes. She should go fight. But then what if she gets caught? What if everyone else has already gotten caught? Someone has to stay with the ship. They've gone over emergency protocols before. In case of everything going completely fuckways, the first priority is making it through the year and getting off planet.

The door creaks open. Lucretia freezes. Holds her breath.

"Stone and judgement, what is that?" a voice from the threshold says. "I've never seen anything like it."

Fischer pulses above her. Lucretia folds herself smaller.

"C'mon Daryl, we don't have all day," A second voice responds. "We're here to find people, not examine the ship. Doesn't look like anyone is in the room."  
"Yeah," Daryl says, "Seeya, freaky glow-thing."

Footsteps. Lucretia exhales. They're gone.

The lights go out.  
______

Time passes. Lucretia doesn't know how much; she's not wearing a watch. Fischer floats around in their tank, occasionally zipping over to her as if they want to check if she's alright.

Eventually, Lucretia stiffly uncurls herself from underneath the tank and, wand held defensively in front of her, steps quietly out of her room.

The ship's hallways look normal, except for the scuffed footprints on the floor. The cockpit is another story — there's an enormous hole in the hull that cold air whistles through. How is she going to repair that?

Lucretia walks cautiously through the ship. She relaxes by inches as each room yields a lack of interlopers.

But there's no one using the intercom to announce "ATTENTION CREW: BARRY JUST CALLED CAPTAINPORT 'DAD,'" no one running down the hallway yelling that someone else stole their skirt, nobody playing chess in the living room, no one napping in the co-pilot's seat, no one playing the guitar while someone else cooks in the kitchen.

She's alone.

______

Lucretia borrows a ring of invisiblity from Barry's desk and the smallest of Magnus's axes before leaving the ship. It's crashed in a rough patch of dirt, bordered on two sides by large outcroppings of rock. There's some sort of police tape wrapped on poles around the ship.

There's an official-looking sign: "OFFWORLD TECH - KEEP OUT"

Okay. First thing's first, Lucretia thinks. She has to move the ship.  
______

They come for her before she can move the ship.

While Lucretia is flipping through Taako and Lup's many books of spells, trying to figure out what could transport the ship somewhere else, she hears footsteps and shouting. She freezes. She had hoped she had a couple of hours at least.

She runs to the engine. It's dull, now. She presses her hands against it.

"C'mon," Lucretia says, under her breath. "It's just me, but they're my family and my best friends, c'mon, you have to work."

The ring-engine pulses once, and flares weakly to life.

"Where'd that girl come from? What's she doing?!"

Voices from behind. Lucretia whips around and is confronted by men with crossbows. She pulls out her wand and casts Sleep as they let loose with their arrows, which go wide except for the one that clips her arm.

She ignores the wound, and runs over to the pilot's chair. Blood streaming and heart in her mouth, she punches the ignition.

The guards on the ground shout as the ship rises in the air. Lucretia ignores the cold wind streaming into the ship and tries to concentrate on getting the vessel aloft. She can do this. She loves her friends, and she's going to keep the ship safe.

The Starblaster screams across the sky, shakily and Lucretia casts featherfall because she knows she's going to crash.

She does. Better than being caught.  
______

She learns about the trial weeks after it happens. It's on a visit to one of the bonfire-towns. She's been trading sketches and stories for supplies. Storytellers are rare outside the City, and the villagers willingly — if not eagerly — trade food and fuel for a sliver of narrative woven over a campfire.

The news, that's free.

They tell her about the trial. It's big news, apparently. This plane doesn't have any sort of instant communications tech so important happenings from the City are disseminated through word of mouth.

"You hear about the bunch of offworlders getting Turned? Harry over in Janville says that's what the light-show from the city was, 'bout a half month ago," a man says to his wife as they pass by where Lucretia is telling stories for coin. She stops them.

"Excuse me sir, what news is this?"  
"The trial," he says.  
"What trial?"  
"The ones the offworlder's were Turned in."  
"Turned?"  
"Oh, you know. Turned to stone. Guess they lost their case."  
"Thank you for letting me know," Lucretia says, voice steady, and turns away.

So her friends are stone. So her friends are dead.

Okay, she thinks. Okay. Get through the year and get them off planet. Okay. She can do this.  
______

They stopped holding funerals for each other thirty years into the journey.

After a while, holding funerals seemed a little morbid, since everyone knew that a year from now, they'd all be alive again. Holding funerals seemed too finite.

Lucretia flicks the switches that divert electricity to their rooms, makes everyone's beds, and closes everyone's bedroom door. And that is the end of it.  
______

Three months in, here is what she's learned about this plane: There is the City, and there is the bonfire-towns. The city is where the gods live and pass judgment. The bonfire-towns are where everyone who thinks the gods would judge them unworthy live. This mostly means normal people, but it's also marauders, pirates, bandits and bounty hunters.

Lucretia's picture is on wanted posters, they talk about a dangerous offworlder with a gleaming spaceship. It's every citizen's duty to stop her, the rumors that she hears say.

Periodically, soldiers from the City come after her, and she has to fight them off before flying the ship to a new location. It's not hard to find her: the Starblaster is a distinctive arc of light across the sky.

One particularly memorable time, she fights off a soldier while flying the ship, which earns her a fair few scars. They'll be gone at the end of the year, though.

And when she lands, sometimes she's greeted by bounty hunters or curious marauders, ready to take over the shining vessel even if they don't know what it is.

Lucretia gets very good at aiming, and very good at waking up at the slightest sound.  
______

Lucretia thinks about trying to find the Light of Creation. But she didn't see where it fell, and it would take too much time to find.

One world condemned for the sake of many. She thinks about the oath that she took with the others, so many cycles ago. She thinks about Lup telling them they need to be better, that they can't lose sight of what they're doing. She thinks about never seeing Lup again.

One world, for the sake of a few.  
______

After everything is over, Magnus will ask her what the worst part of the year was. Lucretia will pause, and then say, "not hearing your racket," as if to make a joke. Magnus will laugh and then hug her, as if to apologize for leaving her alone.

But it's true. The silence is the worst part.

Seven months into the year, she figures out how to cloak the ship while flying, and she breathes a sigh of relief. She needs to get it spaceworthy, and being able to hide the ship is a relief.

She gets four months of peace. Nobody comes to bother her. She learns how to weld from trial and error, and the hole in the hull is patched. It's quiet. Lucretia paces the hallways, sits alone in the living room, makes herself dinner in the kitchen.

Just her, and Fischer.  
  
It's almost a relief when she's attacked again.  
______

She has never been so afraid of death. After so many cycles, death has lost its sting. But. If she goes down, they all go down, the Hunger devours them and all of reality is snuffed out.

Lucretia is acutely aware that the future of existence itself rests on her shoulders. It's terrifying, and at night before she goes to sleep she lies awake thinking about all the ways everything could go wrong.

But her feelings don't matter.  
_____

Fly, fight, sleep. Read books about engineering, about magic, about piloting ships. Run mile after mile in the gym on the treadmill because she never knows when you're going to need to run. Weld sheets of metal onto the hull. Talk to Fischer. Talk to your dead friends. Go weeks without talking to another human being because she can't trust anyone in this plane. Travel to bonfire-towns to trade stories for food and water and remember that people are fundamentally good. Shoot spells at the men and women who want her goddamn life and goddamn ship.

Think about what Davenport would do. What Barry would do. What Lup and Taako would do. What Merle would do. What Magnus would do.

Think about what Lucretia would do.

Time passes. Lucretia cuts her hair short. It's more practical that way.  
_____

The Hunger comes with little fanfare, and Lucretia knows it's time to go when she sees the columns of black dripping from the sky.

Lucretia loves her friends. Like hell are they going to die here. She sits in the pilot's seat. She grits her teeth, and pushes buttons and flicks switches, and prays with her hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

The ring-engine pulses once, twice, and flares a bright white, and the ship shakily flies upward, piercing the atmosphere, breaking into the dark void of space. Behind her, the Hunger envelops the godsforsaken planet that she's left behind, bonfires winking out.

Behind her, light coalesces into six figures.

**Author's Note:**

> god damn my girl did so good and i am very proud of her. 
> 
> if u liked this slip me a kudos or a review, or dont! that is your prerogative. it'd be cool if u did, though! 
> 
> hmu at anonymousalchemist.tumblr.com for more of this *gestures vaguely* whatever this is.


End file.
